Word: combatting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Vegas, when male Navy officers and reservists were not assaulting frightened women or drinking from the navels of cooperative ones, they took part in a series of professional seminars. A female naval officer asked a panelist at one such session when women would be permitted to fly combat airplanes. Her question drew hisses and boos and the call "We don't want women!" from the audience. The senior officer on the panel, an admiral, treated it as a joke by ducking under the table...
...path to the stars, especially those worn on uniforms, was opened last week. Defense Secretary Les Aspin ordered all the services to remove restrictions on women flying combat aircraft and said he would ask Congress to lift the ban on women serving aboard warships at sea. The change has long been visible on the horizon, but it was hurried along by a Navy eager to do something to smooth the choppy wake left by its official report on Tailhook. As the damaging document was readied for release two weeks ago, Navy brass quietly assured servicewomen at the Pentagon that...
Aspin called the new role for women "historic." There are only about 800 female pilots in uniform now, so the number of women combat flyers will be relatively low for some time -- a few hundred out of more than 41,000 pilots in all the services. It is still a dramatic departure in American society and its armed forces. The new era was symbolized at Aspin's Pentagon press conference by Air Force Captain Sharon Preszler, 28, a soft-spoken strawberry blond. "I can be a killer," she said firmly. "I can and will kill in defense of my country...
...Force Chief of Staff, General Merrill McPeak, told a group of female officers, "I think it is a mistake to open up bombers and fighters to women. I have a culturally based hang-up. I can't get over this image of old men ordering young women into combat." Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness in Livonia, Michigan, blasted the Administration after last week's announcement, accusing Bill Clinton of preparing "to order the nation's daughters into killing zones and rape motels which he himself avoided...
...issue of women in combat is still not entirely resolved. Before Aspin's order went out, about half the 1.75 million slots in the armed forces were closed to the 201,000 women in uniform because they could not serve in combat units. Under the new rules, they are still ineligible for about 40% of the slots. The reason: those assignments are in "combat arms" of Army and Marine ground forces, mainly infantry, armored units and artillery. While a few slots might open up for women in missile artillery, no one is talking about putting women into tanks or foxholes...